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The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

forums.unrealengine.com

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Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#101

Post by Kiro »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #82
sytelus wrote: post #72

This is bad, very bad. A complete and utter disrespect for people who poured in their blood and sweat in creating the content for them and for free. Migrating only "top" content is insufficient and so ignorant. The value of wiki is almost entirely in long tail. Vast majority of Unreal engine is undocumented where you get all kind of issues few have seen before. If it wasn't for the community creating content for them…

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning: > Why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

How can it be a security risk?

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#102

Post by kalleboo »

skissane wrote: post #42
erichocean wrote: post #2

I always wonder why companies do stupid things—like this. At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a big disclaimer at the top saying so. But to just destroy information, information about your own product , is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

> But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so. From a purely historical/retrocomputing point of view, I'm really disappointed IBM took the legacy Library Server site offline. It was full of fascinating detritus... old OS/2 manuals, various ancient layered products that IBM dreamed up once upon a time back in the 1990s or early 2000s and which never went any…

There's a similar deal going on with Apple.

They still host a bunch of old classic Mac/Apple II files, but they're not longer browsable, you have to find old links to them.

E.g, here's the first floppy image to install MacOS System 7.5.3 http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Soft...

Their support site also still has a bunch of articles from the 90's in the database, you can still get them to show up in the searches on their own support site, but they're not browsable and hence not indexed by Google.

Anyone need help getting HyperCard 1.2.5 working on their Macintosh IIfx with the NuBus Macintosh Display Card 8*24 GC? https://support.apple.com/kb/TA46247?viewlocale=en_US&locale...

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#103

Post by pjmlp »

fiblye wrote: post #61
jokoon wrote: post #6

Since I started using Ogre3D I always had a hard time settling down to feature rich engines like unreal or unity. I don't know how often, giving beginners access to a space shuttle, will it lead to a successful project that can compete with non-indie game developers. There is also a fine line between an indie team of developers who can benefit from those tools, and experienced game developers who would not need them.…

As someone who's written engines, worked in bare bones do-everything-yourself frameworks, and used Unity, not everyone has the time or ability to sit down and code almost everything from scratch. Some people have simple ideas that involve mostly gluing parts together and big engines are fine for that. Some can program everything if they want to, but they want a decent physics, rendering, and user input engine from th…

That was one of the reasons (among others) that I never went beyond demoscene like stuff, always went too deep into engine stuff, and never produced anything really interesting as a game.

Anyone that wants to do games should use a pre-made engine, if the game is at all interesting, people will play it, even if the technology sucks.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#106

Post by zelphirkalt »

JeremyNT wrote: post #87
c3534l wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lesson I've long learned: never bookmark anything. Bookmarks are to temporarily remember a URL, not to archive content. If the content is important or meaningful to you, save the page.

Yes this. Grab the 'singlefile' add-on[0] and train yourself to hit that instead of bookmarking. You'll be much happier if you ever need the information again! [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/

I'll bookmark that page, thank you!

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#107

Post by nikanj »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #82
sytelus wrote: post #72

This is bad, very bad. A complete and utter disrespect for people who poured in their blood and sweat in creating the content for them and for free. Migrating only "top" content is insufficient and so ignorant. The value of wiki is almost entirely in long tail. Vast majority of Unreal engine is undocumented where you get all kind of issues few have seen before. If it wasn't for the community creating content for them…

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning: > Why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

Turn both the DB and the disk read-only and your security issues should mostly be solved.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#108

Post by nikanj »

c3534l wrote: post #62
Traster wrote: post #10

The thing that seems super strange to me is that they don't seem to have warned people they would do this, the first comment is > This isn't very helpful, Amanda! I know that the wiki wasn't optimal, but there were many wiki pages developers like me had bookmarked for years beacuse they contained comprehensive and easy information, which is now missing. Why not just keep the wiki read-only online? Just to retain the…

Lesson I've long learned: never bookmark anything. Bookmarks are to temporarily remember a URL, not to archive content. If the content is important or meaningful to you, save the page.

Too bad modern single-page apps make it very hard to just scrape the site.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#109

Post by nikanj »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #16
erichocean wrote: post #2

I always wonder why companies do stupid things—like this. At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a big disclaimer at the top saying so. But to just destroy information, information about your own product , is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

In my experience this sort of decision is always driven by sales / marketing people deciding they want to funnel the users into some other part of the site that nobody currently uses because it's not as good.

"Your bonuses are tied to the amount of traffic your blog posts generate" is such a 2020s KPI. And I've heard of more than one person whose compensation package has those metrics.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#110

Post by onion2k »

smacktoward wrote: post #85
Aqua_Geek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning: > Why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

So crawl the Wiki pages, grind out static HTML copies of them, and make those available. Not many security risks associated with static HTML. What am I missing here?

Static content needs a web server and a way to move the content to the server (ftp, sftp, rsync..), and ssl certification, and a DNS entry, and DDOS protection, and a way to manage credentials for those things. It's not zero risk at all. There are plenty of ways to attack a static site. The only way static is safer is because you're not executing scripts on the server (which is a massive win, I don't want to down play that aspect), everything else is the same as a dynamic site.

That's still a lame excuse though. They could have outsourced all the "hard" stuff to a free Netlify account.

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